Christmas Presents, Christmas Presents!

It is that time a year again. When as woodworkers we have been spending the past month not only buying Christmas presents but making a few also. For my projects I ended up with 6 end grain cutting boards and a toy block for my youngest daughters first Christmas. The cutting boards are in straight Spagnoulo fashion all the way down to the Purple Heart and Maple.

The last cutting board I made, which you can read in my last post End Grain Cutting Board was much more difficult to make as I did the glue up of all of the individual blocks at once. The issue was the it was much more difficult to control the glue up and I ended up with some adjustments to make. In the end I was happy with the results and the pattern was not something that could have been achieved with the method I used this build.

For the current cutting boards I glued up alternate strips of Purple Heart and Maple. Then ripped the boards apart cross grain and alternated the pieces to give the checker board pattern. The next step was to flip each piece up so that the end grain is turned up. I am not going to go into anymore detail in this post as I feel that Marc does a more than adequate job of explaining in his video which can be found here on The Wood Whisperer web site.

My wife also asked me to make an ABC block for our youngest daughters first Christmas. The block was a lot of fun to design and build. I wanted to have each side in contrast to the next and link together like a puzzle. It was more complicated that I originally thought as I wanted each side to look the same and I was happy with the end result.

I decided that instead of just using the ABC and 123 on the block that I would use her initials on three sides and date of birth on the other three. The letters and numbers were branded onto the wood with a wood burner and the letters sketched from a standard template. Wanting the block to be more than…well just a block I decided to add BB’s to the inside to make the block a rattle also. For more details on the ABC block check back in as I will be posting a full post on the details of the build as well as Google SketchUp drawing and patterns I put together.

It takes a lot more time to build things like the cutting boards and the toy block but I believe most of us do it in hopes that the things we build will be cherished and passed down as something special. So what did you build this year that you will be giving as presents?

I am sure your dad loves the TV console, send me a picture sometime. I told my wife a few days ago that this year I need to plan ahead of time on what I will give for Christmas next and try and get started early….but honestly if probably won’t happen…